


red on our fingertips

by mimizans



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Dark, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-03
Updated: 2012-06-03
Packaged: 2017-11-06 18:24:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/421852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for a prompt at the avengers comment ficathon. "clint/natasha; both their hands are stained with blood."</p>
            </blockquote>





	red on our fingertips

Natasha has just slit a man’s throat. It’s all in a day’s work, she supposes. She has stolen the lives of too many people to have room for regret, and thieves seldom give back their winnings.

The man drops to the floor, white shirt now printed with red flowers, a garden blooming from the wound in his neck. He’s gurgling, choking on his own blood as it seeps onto the concrete floor. Natasha kicks him out of her path to make her way down the stairs.

Clint is waiting for her at the bottom. He’s been fighting hand to hand - she can tell from the blood spatter on his face and the grim line of his mouth. Clint doesn’t like to kill up close and personal; he prefers murder from a distance, quick and clean. Natasha is used to killing face to face. She has put knives through tuxedos while waltzing, choked men to death while sitting in their laps. The way Natasha kills is not for everyone; it requires a certain brutality that Clint just does not possess. 

Killing is still killing, though, and Natasha knows that Clint is no less deadly than herself, no less capable of taking a life. Clint may not have set fire to any hospitals, but he has put arrows in the necks of men and women with mortgages and minivans. He has killed mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters with detached accuracy, just as she has. There is blood dripping from them both. 

Sometimes Natasha imagines she can feel that blood rolling down her thumbs, her palms stained the red of a pumping heart. Looking at Clint now, his face hard and splashed with the blood of a man whose name he never knew, Natasha can see the blood running down his hands, pooling at his feet. It’s an echo of her own sorry state, and it takes her breath away.

Natasha doesn’t believe in love. It’s a game played by people too scared and stupid to recognize the atrocities all around them, and Natasha has no use for it. She does not love Clint; love is fraudulent, and Clint is too real and warm for that. Clint is a part of her, a mirror image, a converging path. He saved her life and he keeps her honest. He trains with her, he laughs with her, he pulls her hair when they fuck. He knows things about her past that she has told no one else. He shares the blood on her hands.

Clint flexes the fingers wrapped tightly around his longbow. “Are we done here?” he asks her, his voice pitched bedroom low. 

“We’re done,” she says. She licks her finger and reaches out to wipe the blood from his cheek.


End file.
